The Clone Wars: Ghosts of Mortis (Mania.com)

By:Rob VauxReview Date: Saturday, February 12, 2011

Cartoon Network assured us that we don’t really know what happens to Anakin Skywalker at the end of the Clone Wars. Turns out, they were lying. We know exactly what happens to Anakin; unfortunately Anakin himself can’t know, so the big scary vision of the future he experiences here must be erased with a convenient bit of hand-waving. It arrives amid a healthy dose of the arc’s mystical fiddle-faddle, as Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka try to stop the evil Son from escaping his planetary confines. Most of the plot amounts to a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Thankfully, a strong visual style helps hide the episode’s tendency to cop out, and the ongoing family dynamics between the Son and his dead sister wrap themselves up fairly neatly. They also provide a more subtle parallel to the future than Anakin’s trumped-up vision, suggesting that the subsequent events might have turned out differently had our heroes played their hand a little better here. That leaves us with some things to chew on, alleviating “Ghosts of Mortis’s” basically arbitrary nature and providing a reasonably engaging thirty minutes in the bargain.